Come to a talk about John Hamilton Hall (1799-1865) at Kelso on 29 March

Part of the research I did for Berwick 900 last year was about a Coldstream lad, John Hamilton Hall, born in 1799, whose father was not only a general physician but also a Freeman of the Berwick-upon-Tweed Guild. 

Seeing his name and occupation in the Guild records led me on an interesting and puzzling hunt for information about his family, his career as an officer in the East India Company’s Bombay Infantry. 

On Sunday, 29^th March, at the Abbey Row Community Centre, The Knowes, Kelso, TD5 7BJ, I’ll be talking about his life and career, however, just as importantly, I’ll be discussing how I researched him, some of the problems I found and the difficulties in reading and understanding the records.  Map.

The talk has been widely advertised, including in Berwick, due to local Berwick interest, so come early to get a good seat. 

I warmly invite you to attend the talk whether you are a member or not. Doors open at 2pm; the talk begins at 2.30pm. 

We'll have a range of family history publications available to buy, and there’ll be light refreshments (donation expected) available after the talk. If you have a problem with your family history, please discuss it with one of our volunteers.

East India Company At Home Project Podcasts

Some of the short presentations at the East India Company At Home Project conference held in Edinburgh a few weeks ago are on History Spot. The speakers are Helen Clifford, Ellen Filor, Margot Finn and Kate Smith.

That website has lots of other interesting history podcasts. 

The Bengal Obituary Available Online

'The Bengal Obituary, or a Record to Perpetuate the Memory of Departed Worth, Being a Compilation of Tablets and Monumental Inscriptions from Various Parts of the Bengal and Agra Presidencies. To Which Is Added Biographical Sketches and Memoirs of Such As Have Pre-Eminently Distinguished Themselves in the History of British India, since the Formation of European Settlement to the Present Time'
is the title of a book that was published in 1848 for Holmes & Co (a firm of undertakers and monumental sculptors in Calcutta) and is over 400 pages long and contains over 5,000 transcriptions of (mainly) Europeans’ gravestones with brief biographies of 130 people who played notable roles in the colonial history of Bengal.

Most of the gravestones are for officials of the East India Company, soldiers, sailors or their families.

One of the notables was Gilbert Elliot, first Earl Minto (1751-1814), Governor General of India from 1807 to 1813.  Although he died in Stevenage, England, a month after his return from India, he was recognised for supporting the addition of a South Gallery to St John’s Church, Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1811 and for erecting at his own expense a cenotaph at Barrackpore in memory of the officers and men who fell in the conquest of Mauritius and Java in 1811.

For more information see The Bengal Obituary.

Come to the East India Company at Home Study Day, Edinburgh

In January, I wrote about Warwick University's East India Company at Home project which will examine how luxury goods from Asia (mainly India) arrived in wealthy homes and their significance.

The project is holding a Study Day on Friday 7th September from 11.30am to 5pm at the University of Edinburgh Library.

The purpose of the event is to bring together academics, curators, heritage sector professionals, local and family historians who are interested in Scottish families, houses and objects with East India Company connections. The event is a follow-up to a study day they held at the British Library in London earlier this year although the focus is different.

The focus in Edinburgh will be on family history and literary sources (poems, stories, family letters and other manuscripts) and will also spend some time looking at the collection of manuscripts brought back by Company servants in order to consider how East India Company officials collected, read and exchanged books. It will also discuss the different ways in which East India Company officials and their families used ideas of family, home and the domestic space when navigating their imperial experiences.

The Study Day is free of charge and lunch will be provided. If you would like to go, email Ellen Filor (who is interested in East India Company family networks and identities in Roxburghshire between 1780 and 1857) at East.India.Company@warwick.ac.uk.

East India Company Bonds and Covenants

The huge and powerful British East India Company was originally formed to trade with the East Indies but at different times traded not only in India and Sri Lanka (Ceylon), but also in Hong Kong, Burma, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. Its main trade was in cotton, dyes, opium, silk, tobacco, salt, saltpetre and tea but it also carried manufactured goods from Britain to sell.

Company employees, soldiers and sailors frequently took (against Company rules) small quantities of goods to trade as well. The Company eventually came to rule large areas of India and other places with its own private army and navy exercising military power and assuming administrative functions which lasted until 1858. It issued coinage in India and Malaysia.

Until 1833, people who wanted to visit India and the Company's other territories were required to observe their rules and to deposit a Bond guaranteeing their good behaviour. Traders had to sign a covenant agreeing not to undertake unapproved business. Bonds were usually to the value of £200 for a visitor and £500 or more for traders.  Each bond applicant had to be recommended by two 'Sureties'  (essentially referees). In the 18th and early 19th centuries, joining the East India Company was a likely route to wealth, if you survived.

The Families In British India Society have indexed the important information in some of the bonds and covenants in the British Library. There are over 3,000 bonds from 1607 to 1770 and 12,500 bonds and other documents from 1814 to 1865. It’s worth looking at this source, if there were members of your family who went to India in these periods. 

Births, Marriages and Deaths in British India

The Families In British India Society, is building a database of intimations in the Times of India newspapers. The database currently contains births, marriages and deaths from 25th July 1859 to 1909.
It took me a long time to spot the surname search for this database, so I've ringed it in red on the picture. It would be nice to be able to search it for a place or a first name as well as a surname but that's not possible, so for a common name you may have to look through a lot of entries. Search the Times of India births, marriages and deaths for yourself.

I looked for my great grandfather, Luke Golding, but he’s not listed so that suggests that although he lived there as a young boy, he wasn’t born in India.


Our latest volume, Coldingham Monumental Inscriptions is now available.

Read our Kith & Kin column every week in the Border Telegraph and Peeblesshire News newspapers.

Breaking Stones for Road-Mending and the Stone Project

I went to a very interesting talk in Maxton, Scotland on Monday evening by Jake Harvey, emeritus Professor and former head of Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art, about the international Stone Project.

He talked for well over an hour, with interesting slides and videos, about quarrying and stone working techniques, sculptors and stone workers, sculptures, and exhibitions.

For me, one of the most astonishing views was that of a female quarry worker in Peenya Quarry, India, breaking up stone using a 15kg (33 lbs) hammer. She must have tremendous strength and I wonder if her back aches too ? She has no protection from chips on splinters, not for her bare arms, feet and ankles, or her head, particularly not for her eyes. I suspect her sari is pretty thin and chips could easily fly through thin cloth. I also wondered if she had ever hit her feet, a blow from that hammer would surely break foot bones.

When Jake said she was breaking stone for road repairs, I immediately thought of the women described in the poor registers (for example, Widow Davidson of Jedburgh, Scotland, aged 45, who 'breaks down stones into sand, and makes about 3d a day'), and in the poorhouse at Jedburgh engaged in breaking stones.

There's more about Widow Davidson of Jedburgh in our publications, Jedburgh Parish (1852-1874) and Jedburgh Parish (1875-1893).

I wonder how Widow Davidson was attired, whether she had any protection, and whether she did the work at home or in a quarry, and whether she was supervised. I haven't managed to find any detailed descriptions of this type of work.

East India Company Family Networks and Identities in Roxburghshire

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 is a 3-year research project ending in August 2014 funded by the Leverhulme Trust, led by Professor Margot Finn of Warwick University.

The project will look at the routes by which Asian luxury goods (for example, ceramics, textiles, metal-ware, furniture and fine art) found their way into the homes of Britain’s governing elite in the Georgian and early Victorian periods, and examines
what these exotic objects meant in these domestic settings and in wider national and international contexts.

The project builds upon historical research produced by family and local historians, curators, academics and other researchers into a wider collaborative research project that illuminates Britain's global material culture from the eighteenth century
to the present.

Dr Helen Clifford will play a leading role in orchestrating the project’s engagement with local and family historians, working together with the project's full-time postdoctoral research fellow, Dr Kate Smith.

Ms Ellen Filor will be funded by the grant to complete a doctoral dissertation on East India Company family networks and identities in Roxburghshire (1780-1857) as an integral part of the larger research team.

Express your interest in the East India Company at Home project.

Dr John Leyden, His Life and Family

In September 1775, in a thatched cottage overlooking Denholm Green, a young father proudly looked down on his first child, to be named John after his father and forefathers. At the time, neither of the parents, John Leyden nor his wife Isabel Scott, could have predicted the fascinating life ahead for their son - a life which was to see him master over 30 Oriental languages, become a minister, surgeon and naturalist, bring him fame as a poet and linguist and earn the respect, admiration and friendship of Sir Walter Scott and other eminent members of 19th century society before travelling to India and an untimely death in Java. A genius had been born - Dr John Leyden.

The title is the title of a talk to be given by Marjorie Gavin at Hawick Library, North Bridge Street, Hawick, TD9 9QT, Scotland on Tuesday 16th November at 7.15pm.

Who Do You Think You Are with Rupert Penry-Jones

I was fascinated by the BBC programme episode shown last night (Friday evening) of Who Do You Think You Are with Rupert Penry-Jones, the actor.

It was interesting to see the part played by a medical unit in a World War II battle, and I hadn't appreciated either the size of Monte Cassino or the height at which it lies. Rupert's ancestor, William Thorne and his men, clearly saved many lives through their actions in the battle of Monte Cassino – what heroes !

More fascinating was the story that one of his ancestors was Indian.
Rupert followed the trail from his' great great grandfather, Theophilus Thorne, his marriage to Sarah Todd in 1885; Sarah's birth record; Thomas and Louisa Todd's marriage in South India in 1866; Louisa's father, Thomas Johnstone, whose name is on the Quarterly Alphabetical Nominal Rolls of the whole of the Europeans of the 1st Madras Fusiliers in 1857 - he left England in 1842. The 1st Madras Fusiliers was an East India Company regiment that ruled British colonial India until 1857. Thomas' regiment was stationed in Allahabad during the Indian Mutiny/War of Independence in 1857.

The researcher has discovered letters he wrote to his wife, Louisa - amazing that they survived and could be found. Louisa was born on 25th Feb 1832, maiden name Smith. Rupert searches on Family Search and finds two entries, follows the first one, (http://www.familysearch.org/eng/default.asp) discovers that her mother, Susanna, was described as an Indo-Briton, born in 1817 in Nagpore; and then visits All Saints Church in Nagpore and finds a birth record relating to Susanna's mother, Elizabeth, who was fully Indian.

However, I wonder whether the researcher's looked at the second entry on the Family Search results which shows the mother as Susanna Callum, however it also shows Louisa's death in 1836. Clearly, if Louisa died at the age of 4, she can't be an ancester of Rupert. Did the researchers validly ignore this ?

Apparently the East India Company, which ran the colonial parts of India before 1858, encouraged their staff in the 17th and 18th centuries to marry Indian women to alleviate homesickness and keep the staff in India, by giving them a bonus of a pagoda coin for each birth, but by the time Louisa was born, the practice had stopped; there were also restrictions on financial assistance and employment opportunities for Indo-Britons. These pagodas were small gold coins issued in Madras and other places, worth about 3½ rupees or about 7 shillings (35p). That might not seem much today, but in the Borders in the 1840s, 7 shillings would have been half a week’s wages for a wright, or a week’s wages for a weaver; and in India it would have had much greater purchasing power.

Families In British India Society  and Indiaman Magazine look like useful resources, if you can put up with the pop-ups and instant audio of the Indiaman Magazine.

To comment on this article, please click the 'comments' link below.  

200th anniversary of the death of Dr John Leyden

August 2011 sees the 200th anniversary of the death of Dr John Leyden, the famous poet and Orientalist from Denholm in the Scottish Borders.

Dr Leyden was a great friend of Sir Walter Scott and it is said that after his death, Scott could never talk about Leyden without a tear in his eye. He really appears to have been a most remarkable man.

Over the next year, one of our members, Marjorie Gavin, who has served our Society both as Editor and as Chairman, and has transcribed births, marriages and deaths overseas from the Hawick Advertiser and Kelso Mail, hopes to visit as many groups and organisations as possible to talk about the life and achievements of the great Dr Leyden whose story deserves to be more widely known.

If you have any memorabilia or documents relating to Dr John Leyden that might assist her in this task please contact her by sending her a private message in our forum or replying to her forum topic.

More about Dr Leyden is in one of Marjorie's articles, The Life and Family of Dr. John Leyden.

To comment on this article, please click the 'comments' link below.  

300 Million New Names Online

Family Search have announced that over 300 million new names have been added, creating or updating more than 150 new collections of records.

Can that be right ? It seems unbelievably large. Even 300,000 would be a lot.

The records can be found at FamilySearch’s Record Search pilot.

Whatever it is, it's good news for all of us.

The collections updated include

• Australia Deaths and Burials, 1816—1980
• Canada Births and Baptisms, 1661—1959
• Canada Deaths and Burials, 1664—1955
• Canada Marriages, 1661—1949
• British Columbia Death Registrations, 1872—1986
• British Columbia Marriage Registrations, 1859—1932
• New Brunswick Births, 1819—1899
• Nova Scotia Births, 1702—1896
• Nova Scotia Marriages, 1711—1909
• Ontario Births, 1779—1899
• Ontario Marriages, 1800—1910
• Quebec  Births, 1662—1898
• Gibraltar Marriages, 1879—1918
• Gibraltar Births and Baptisms, 1704—1876
• Great Britain Deaths and Burials, 1778—1988
• Great Britain Marriages, 1797—1988
• Channel Islands Births and Baptisms, 1820—1907
• Isle of Man Births and Baptisms, 1821—1911
• Isle of Man Deaths and Burials, 1844—1911
• Isle of Man Marriages, 1849—1911
• Wales, Births and Baptisms, 1586—1907
• Wales, Deaths and Burials, 1586—1885
• Wales, Marriages, 1541—1900
• Ireland Deaths, 1864—1870
• India Births and Baptisms, 1800—1945
• India Deaths and Burials, 1800—1945
• India Marriages, 1800—1945

as well as lots of records from south and central America, the Caribbean, Europe, Russia, and the USA.

Happy searching !

If you want to volunteer to help Family Search, you can do that at FamilySearchIndexing.org. If you would rather help closer to home, please go to our Contacts page and send us a message, choosing the contact type Offers of Help.

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